


Epoxy Greasing Wheels

by Allekha



Category: Papers Please (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, Dystopia, Gen, Revolution, Work
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-28
Updated: 2020-04-28
Packaged: 2021-03-02 01:29:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,234
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23886736
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Allekha/pseuds/Allekha
Summary: His job on the border, the Inspector thought, would be dull and tedious, similar from one day to the next, and aside from the personal dramas of those crossing through or the threat of individual terrorists, relatively unimportant.It was none of those things.
Comments: 8
Kudos: 33
Collections: Minigame: Round 1





	Epoxy Greasing Wheels

**Author's Note:**

  * For [asuralucier](https://archiveofourown.org/users/asuralucier/gifts).



There are many things the Inspector expects when he receives the letter telling him about his new job on the border.

He expects, more or less, the working conditions he is given. Cold concrete floor, a tiny and inadequate heater for his feet, a constant chill that seeps in even when the doors are closed. Weak light from the windows in the doors, stronger light from the bare light bulbs, giving everyone a strange color to their skin. A desk that's neat and orderly, obviously recycled from some office, scuffed at the edges but with no other sign of its previous life or previous user.

It's cramped, but he hardly needs to move to do his work, and it's better than the factory he and his wife used to work in. That was always inescapably noisy in a way that followed into their dreams, and the standing made their legs ache every day. Here it is quiet, and here he can sit at his desk and look at his book. It is new, printed with simple instructions.

He expects the work to be tedious, but in truth it is only that for the first day. As the instructions from on high come faster than new books can be printed, as he has to cross-reference and inspect more documents from every hopeful border-crosser, he finds that in fact he enjoys it.

He's always been good at numbers; his family leaves the accounts to him, and he used to convert recipe quantities for his mother, since he was so much faster at it. Detail work comes easily to him, and so poring over two or three pieces of paper, making sure the photo matches the person, that the dates and ID number line up, that the cities are correct, that the required seals are present – it's satisfying. In his first week, he only makes one real mistake over dozens of people. One moment of slipped attention. He tells himself it will not happen again.

The Inspector expects the job to be as strict as his previous one at the now-closed factory. He is surprised to find that it takes two citations in a day before they threaten to dock his pay. Two! And the pay is better than he thought it would be, at least at his quick rate. Enough to live on in their own apartment, instead of squishing in with two other families. Enough to pick up medicine when his mother-in-law has a headache and to buy a present for his son's birthday.

He expects the sob stories. Of course there will be sob stories; he's heard enough of them waiting in line for other places. Of course someone who has been waiting ten hours to cross the border will be desperate not to wait again the next day.

At first, he tells himself that he might keep his head down, do as he has been instructed. But then a woman begs him in a whisper, talking about her son, the son she hasn't seen since before the war, and he looks at her holding back her tears as he wraps his hand over the stamp that will reject her, her eyes pleading and dark in the odd light.

Somehow, it makes him think of his own little son. His son who didn't understand why his parents suddenly were home so much more after the factory closed, but only delighted in spending more time with them when they weren't scrambling for money in other ways. His son who always greets him when he comes home and chatters before dinner about his day. His son who likes football and basketball and drawing and, in his own childish way, even a bit of math, which makes the Inspector proud.

Would he look like her, if his son was ripped away from him for years, and a border inspector was the only one who could decide if they could meet again?

He stamps her through. The sound of the citation printer make him flinch. He doesn't look at the paper as he tosses it to the corner of his desk and presses the button to call the next applicant in from the seemingly infinite line outside.

\---

Someone expected a terrorist attack; he was told that it was a possibility the first day he trudged up to his booth for the minimal tour it required. But with all the papers demanding his attention, the Inspector forgets about any such thing until he happens to see, in the corner of his eye through the small window, the bomb arcing in the air.

Instinct has him under his desk and hands over his ears before the explosion rattles his booth. Afterward, he stumbles up, shoving aside his chair, almost tripping over his heater. The current applicant curses; he barks at her to stay put on threat of arrest and pushes open the door as soon as the gunshots hesitate and then stop.

There are bodies in the snow, some perhaps still alive, others definitely not. There is a small crater in the concrete from the bomb, smoked black with soot, and the air no longer smell like the freshness of winter, but something acidic and burnt.

Some of the guards gather around the bodies of their fellows, while others spread out and watch the border wall anxiously. The Inspector mills around them. There don't seem to be a lot of orders being given, and people keep looking at him as he passes by.

Is he meant to be in charge? Surely not. The guards are guards and he is an inspector. It must only be the shock in them, spooked by the surprise and death and for many of them, echoes of the war. He doesn't feel much calmer than they look, his heart pounding away in his chest.

But perhaps it doesn't matter, not until some authority shows up. And he's comfortable giving orders to others, even when they curse at him, like those he rejects because of a passport that expired only the day before.

He tells them to secure the wall and make sure the line is closed, to assist those already helping the injured, to guard the bodies of the fallen, to make sure any curious onlookers can't come too close. They obey him when he gives each their task, surprisingly enough, and then he goes back into his booth and calmly tells the last applicant that she cannot leave until she gives a statement when the police come.

Then he checks her papers again. Fortunately for her, despite all the trouble, they are in order. He stamps her in. Glory to Arstotzka, he tells her. She stares at him in response.

He doesn't get bonus pay, or anything like that. He didn't think he would. (In fact, he gets paid less than he might have been, since his working day was cut short. Goddamn Kolechians.)

\---

 _Arstotzka is great country poisoned by corrupt leaders_ , the note had said. The Inspector had returned it to the man who brought it, but he can still see every word. _Help us free Arstotzka from its shackles._

If he were ten years younger, he might have leapt at the chance. But older now, with a family that depends, at the moment, solely on his pay, wary of the attempted rebellions that the papers gleefully announce crushed with no mercy, more aware of the situations in other countries – he hesitates.

He can't sleep that night, and eventually slips from the bedroom where they all sleep to make tea in their tiny kitchen. As the kettle heats, he thinks about how he heard a better apartment will become available soon, shivering in the draft they can't seem to block; he thinks about EZIC and their purported mission.

His wife appears in the doorway. Her eyes are tired; she may not have a new job yet, waiting on the lottery, but their son is still a handful at his age. She sits with him and he makes tea for both of them.

"There was someone at the checkpoint today," he tells her, leaning into her side, in such a low voice that nobody could possibly overhear them (he hopes). "They asked for my help. With political matters. To make things better, so they say."

He knows firsthand that Arstotzka is not a good place; in the past, he's been the one praying officials would be in a good mood, or giving out bribes to clear his way. (He is still shocked that he won the job lottery, and was even given something decent, before he'd scraped together enough to guarantee a new career.) He knew that before he stepped into the booth at the border. But he knows it could be worse, and not because the paper crows about how great and glorious their country is in comparison to others. Republia had a revolution a decade ago, promising new prosperity and equality for all, and according to their old roommates, refugees, things had only grown worse after it.

"I don't know who they are," he says. He has no way to try and tell if their organization is honest, if their ideals are good ones, what the risks are. He has his family to consider. The police would not stop at arresting him if they found out. "I don't know what to say."

His wife is quiet; she tucks her head against him and wraps her hands around her tea. "What would you say," she asks eventually, "if we were still sixteen?"

At sixteen, they had gone on long walks to escape their little hometown with nothing in it. The woods had been bursting with greenery or lonely with snowfall, and they had walked and walked and talked and talked. She was reading the books her mother wasn't supposed to own; she gave them to him to read, too.

There had been one point when he had designed a whole new government system. Something efficient, but with the capability to extend some kindness. Probably too idealistic, too impractical for the real world, but the shape of it had worked in his head like the equations worked on his school papers.

He'd even written it down over the years, this brilliant plan of his. Before they'd moved out to West Grestin at nineteen, he had burned the papers, telling himself it was stupid to have ever put those ideas where someone else might have seen them.

The structures are still there in his head, a decade later. Elegant, organized.

"How much attention do they really pay to you in your booth?" she asks.

He doesn't sleep that night. But when EZIC comes to him again, he lets their agents through.

\---

He expects the sob stories, but not how many there are. How many he passes through the checkpoint anyway, telling himself that this one is the last one. He doesn't know, for the most part, how they turn out. It's comforting to think that he can tell who is telling the truth, who deserves small mercies for themselves and citations for himself. But really, he doesn't know.

He doesn't expect the rules to change so often. The factory also had some dramatic shifts in standards and expectations, but not every day. He gets in the habit of redoing the first page in his rulebook the moment he comes in, after reading the bulletin that is inevitably on his desk. People allowed, people not allowed, people inspected, diplomats and worker passes and enough papers to coat his desk just for one person.

He doesn't expect to be handed a gun. He is trained to use them, but hasn't touched one in years. He doesn't expect to lean out the door of his booth and breathe out, count one, two, three, and save Sergiu's life.

He doesn't expect his job to mean much. To the individual people, for whom Arstotzka is home or escape or at least a transit point, perhaps, yes. But to the extent that his actions in accepting or rejecting or detaining people one day can affect the headlines the next? They never mention his name or his work, but still they are there in black ink for everyone to read.

He doesn't expect to be wrapped up in conspiracies of the kind he might have celebrated when he was younger. He is warier now, more cautious. But perhaps if he helps EZIC, he can shape them. Perhaps they will be better than the structures in place after all. Perhaps he is bored of being a cog in the machine. His wife doesn't ask after them, not after that first conversation; he does his work normally, by all appearances, simply making mistakes in who he lets in.

He doesn't expect things to shift so much more in a month than they should have in a year, to be torn from his newfound job by revolutionaries and to be told he has more important work to do in creating an Arstotzka that is truly glorious and uncorrupt.

Even still, for all their words, they give him papers. It is really not so different. He sits down at a desk that is scuffed and used in different ways than the one in his booth, and arranges papers far more important than any passport or vaccination record, ready to line up numbers and names once more.


End file.
